Caitlin Flanagan on Young Women, Hookup Culture and Relationships

The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan has a knack for causing eruptions in the left-leaning blogosphere. Last time, Flanagan was castigating public schools for their new focus on vegetable gardens. Back in July, she connected the teenage obsession with vampires to "female romantic awakening." Now, in the June issue of
The Atlantic, she returns to her familiar female (teenage) sexuality
beat, setting out to explain "how girls reluctantly endure the hookup culture."

Her argument is that girls, receiving scant adult guidance and
intimidated or turned off by today's promiscuity, are silently yearning
for boyfriends--as evidenced by the current obsession with the Twilight
Saga, High School Musical, Taylor Swift, and the TV show Glee. Along
the way she offers some personal anecdotes, asserts that girls who used
to "[look] forward to sex" are now "terrified" of it, and suggests that
drinking is a symptom of that. Though a few bloggers find these ideas "very interesting," and are pleased to see someone criticize "the 1970s feminist-inspired regime of sexual liberation," most who have much to say beyond this are highly critical.

Virgin/Whore 2.0
This "false dichotomy," argues Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, "is never
far away from these discussions, no matter how much any individual
writer avoids those terms." But this "notion that women who hook up are
a discrete group from those who have boyfriends" is about as accurate,
she argues, as "the anti-choice myth that posits that women who have
abortions are a separate group from women who have children." She also
thinks Flanagan "went as far as to suggest that young women want
boyfriends because they really don't like sex," and is relying on some
other odd assumptions as well:

It's not surprising
that a bunch of college freshmen---an age that's marked by feelings of
naivete and insecurity---might report being desperate to be validated
by a boyfriend, any boyfriend. But it doesn't follow that a college
senior who is choosing mostly casual hook-ups is deceiving herself.
She might have learned a thing or two, and may have realized that it's
better to wait for the right guy to commit instead of clinging to
anyone who looks at you twice.

Remember the Individual Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory
looks at Flanagan's piece in the context of the recent spate of stories
about "young women's sex lives." Instead of responding directly to
Flanagan--although she does suggest the piece's conclusion is
unsurprising, she makes a point about this trend in
general: "What's often lost in the never-ending stream of stories about
the latest trend in female sexual culture is the nuance and diversity
of individual experience."

'The Entire Piece Is Confused,' writes Amber Taylor,
blogger of Prettier Than Napoleon. "Flanagan doesn't clearly
differentiate between when she's talking about the teens of today and
the teens of five to ten years before," and ignores the fact, argues
Taylor, that "there never was a time where the 'Boyfriend Story' was
not ascendant." In other words: girls have always wanted relationships
and happy endings. Taylor concludes:

Flanagan
is, as usual, simultaneously soporific and alarmist, waxing eloquent on
the perils of modern feminism and then lulling the reader with the idea
that all that unnatural liberation stuff will ultimately not prevail.

'Responses to This Article Were More Interesting Than the Article Itself,' writes Robin Wasserman,
who also clarifies for readers: "yes, this is from "the same Caitlin
Flanagan who thought 'I hate Y.A. novels; they bore me' was a good
start to an article offering her thoughts on....YA novels." Calling the
thesis "a bit muddled," she nevertheless extracts what she thinks is
Flanagan's point, and finds it questionable.

'Amid the Weirdness ... Is One Good Point,' decides Jezebel's Anna North:
"teen girls do need a different kind of sex ed." Recalling her own
nineties-era sex ed, she says she calls learning "about IUDs and STDs,
but [not] ... how to actually talk to a partner about contraception or
getting tested. I didn't learn how to discuss painful sex with a
partner; I didn't learn that painful sex existed. I didn't learn how to
decide when I was ready for sex based on anything but standards imposed
from the outside."